Dance of Sword and Heron - The Valrayne Saga, #1

With chaos rampant and the treasury running on IOU's, Princess Lirienne Valrayne of Izarré knows a forced marriage awaits her. But her ambitions run elsewhere. For years she's made secret forays into the Wetlands to learn the forbidden Dances of Eostre from a mysterious crone. The Dances enable a gifted practitioner to invoke the qualities of animal lives experienced during earlier turns upon the Wheel of Life and Death.
But can they win her freedom?When Lirienne hears the voice of her brother Amaury, lying wounded and besieged in a distant castle, call to her, she recognizes the Power of Eostre at work. Beleaguered by visions of his years at war, Amaury sinks ever deeper into the Shadowlands. If she cannot drag him back into this realm, an eternity of nightmare awaits him. Not even death can set him free. Lirienne's mentor Yseronne warns that the same fate threatens all humanity.
The Dance of Light and Dark, which forms what we perceive as the world, grows ever more imbalanced as savagery sweeps across the war-torn Kingdoms. Should Darkness finally engulf Light, the world itself must cease to exist. But human souls, which transcend the material, will persist. In Darkness-induced nightmares. Forever. When Lirienne resorts to the skills of Eostre to save Amaury, she falls prey to charges of witchcraft fomented by her older sister and a Bishop greedy for her Power.
No allies step forward to defend her. Until two fugitives arrive from the far north. One, an alchemist himself one step ahead of the stake, offers elixirs he promises will help her save Amaury, yet which Yseronne sternly warns against. The other, an outlaw fleeing the ghosts of a seven-year saga of revenge, offers to serve as her Champion. But he must face not only the Church's Champion, but its sorcery.
The first book of a five-volume epic fantasy, The Dance of Sword and Heron depicts an endangered world with the souls of all humaity as the stakes. A gripping adventure full of battle and intrigue, magic and passion, the series follows the struggles of a young woman who amid all the hopes and confusions of love must surmount ordeal after ordeal to transform herself into the Champion of Light.